Anxieties Surface Over Reform Agenda

It’s not only the Chinese Dream that might be losing a bit of direction. The reform drive that the new Communist Party leadership has in mind is also having difficulty keeping up the pace.

Since the start of the year, People’s Daily has been running a set of essays outlining the ways in which reform in China needs to be shaped and positioned—something it has taken to calling the “methodology of deepening reform” (in Chinese). These essays show that there’s clearly a campaign being waged by Party leader Xi Jinping and his allies bent on convincing cadres and citizens alike that they have a different reform agenda to offer than their predecessors.

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The commentaries are appearing in People’s Daily because when this bullhorn of the Party sounds off—and at this sort of length and consistency–cadres listen. Reformers know they have opponents and fence-sitters, and they’re trying to convince the unhappy to come around.

These essays have a number of intersecting themes.

First, that new approaches are needed: The essays argue that the well-trodden path to reform from before is interesting, but it is insufficient for the country’s current challenges. After all, the questions for China have changed from raw economic development to the inequalities and advantages produced by that development. As one of the essays (in Chinese) puts it, “for reform today, you need to answer the questions, ‘Change for whom? Why change? How to change?’ You have to tell the people, after we cross the river by feeling the stones, what it looks like on the opposite bank.”

Second, the commentaries emphasize the importance of raising public expectations for the sake of more popular participation, by pledging to “protect the interests of the majority” by focusing on “fair levels of justice and social progress” (in Chinese). That approach dovetails with recent efforts in leading Party circles allow more media scrutiny of shortcomings like the state of air quality in Chinese cities or the fate of abandoned children. Increasing transparency promotes support in society by giving citizens to hope for from a new leadership – one that’s plainly seeking to subvert conservatives in the Party.

Finally, there’s the theme of policy balance: That reform, development, and stability have to be integrated, so that “reform is the driving force; the purpose is development; with stability as the prerequisite” (in Chinese).

That’s a departure from the truncheon-swinging and political takedowns that the previous leadership engaged in. Stability, Xi and his comrades have been saying, makes it possible to push restructuring further and faster. The point is not just to remain in power, but actually use stability for reform.
So far, so good.

But a few days back, some concern started to creep into these commentaries – suggesting more than a few in the Party have misgivings about reform.

A lengthy essay on Monday (in Chinese) conceded that “more than ever, today’s reforms also face more stringent scrutiny, and carry more heavy expectations” than those before. Among the challenges, the commentary noted, is “the pressure of simultaneous economic and social transformation” and the consequences that are brought when reform proceeds in a piecemeal, individual fashion. Comprehensive reform works far better than individual, trial-and-error efforts, the commentary insists. Reform that isn’t adopted and pursued as a package creates collisions, as the essay has it—of people advocating alternative ways of change, as well as various powerful interests that seek to shut down attempts to rollback their gains.

That’s why that the Party leadership wants to go further with the reforms it’s already presented, instead of restarting debates about what reforms are actually needed, the essay notes. And there’s also “urgency, a sense that time waits for no one,” so the Party needs to recapture “the great political courage” that it showed in previous eras.

That’s not exhortation so much as anxiety.

It’s growing increasingly apparent from the tone of reform-related commentaries in the Party’s flagship that it’s more than just the shy, the unsure, and the slow holding up more rapid reform. There is also outright opposition.

Xi and his reformist allies have been forced to take note, prodding colleagues and cadres to get going. A follow-up front-page commentary in Thursday’s People’s Daily admonished “those in command” to “take the lead” in “changing not only work style, but content.”

It’s true that reformers have made some progress since Xi took over, including kick-starting and then continuing sharp conversations about corruption and how to confront it (in Chinese). The problem of cadres protecting their relatives when they behave badly, for example, has been a consistent target of criticism in recent months (in Chinese).

Still, speed matters—especially when there’s an old guard with a direct stake in slowing reforms. It’s good that Xi and the cadres that walk with him have a new model and new hopes to wave about. It would be far better if they found some more momentum soon—before reluctance and resistance gather to shut down the whole race.

Russell Leigh Moses is the Dean of Academics and Faculty at The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies. He is writing a book on the changing role of power in the Chinese political system.

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